Operators of cellular telecommunications networks or public land mobile networks use—in addition to base transceiver stations—WLAN Access Points (APs) to establish a data bearer of a data connection with a mobile subscriber or user equipment. To achieve this, access points, especially WLAN (wireless local area network) access points, are deployed as public hot-spots, and they can be directly owned by the operator of the public land mobile network or accessible via roaming agreements with third-parties.
The rules and procedures for connecting user equipments in a cellular telecommunications network to such WLAN access points are especially specified through access policy controls. Presently, e.g., network policies are executed at the user equipment side via a device connection manager (CM) application. Generally, the connection manager handles information about network access policies, discovery of WLAN access points, and user preferences.
To facilitate the integration of WLAN access points into the mobile core network, several standard bodies have investigated different features regarding user equipment network authentication and interworking between cellular and WLAN networks. As for WLAN networks, the Wi-Fi Alliance standard activity “Hotspot 2.0” introduces enhancements in terms of SIM-based user equipment authentication and network discovery of WLAN access points.
In TS 24.302 3GPP defined the access to the Enhanced Packed Core for non-3GPP access to which also WLAN is considered. The 3GPP-standardized Access Network Discovery and Selection Function (ANDSF) specifies in 3GPP TS 24.312 a framework for delivering access network selection policies to user equipments. The policies define network selection rules and connection configurations for access selection, by the user equipment, between using the (cellular) access network of the 3GPP network (or telecommunications network) and non-3GPP access points or networks that do not inherently belong to the 3GPP network, such as WLAN networks or WLAN access points. The policies can be based on user equipment location, time of day, list of available WLAN access points, and IP-flow and multi-network connectivity capabilities.